A day

It was a day. Some stuff went well, some stuff didn’t. And that was the case even if stuff got sub-catagorised: for example, bits of the football were good, others not. And now I’m watching Chelsea and Spurs kicking chunks out of each other.

It ended – the day, not the FA Cup semi final – with me wandering around in the dark, barefoot, 200 metres around the corner up the road from our house, chasing an UberEats driver who had already taken 35 minutes to do a 5 minute trip. Guess how nice our food was?

The UberEats experience didn’t have a positive side.

Tomorrow will also be a day. Hopefully with less UberEats and more happy bits.

Never a dull moment

Just another week in the mad world of South African news.

Triggering just another ANC media release. Except, this one includes this line:

The ANC will leave it to psychoanalysts and scholars of art to debate Mabulu’s narcissistic obsession with the phallus and human genitalia in general.

No matter how crazy you think Western politics has become recently, they are still some distance from matching this sort of banter.

Future Islands at Coachella

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was chasing the new Future Islands album. I caught it just before we left for Namibia, but there wasn’t much time to give it a good listen on the Orange River. And when I did get around to it, it was actually rather disappointing. The new Elbow album wasn’t like that – it was instantly captivating. But sometimes you need to hear things a couple of times before they grab you.

Patience, grasshopper.

Now I’ve heard it a bit more, I’m there. Right with it. Singing along, loving it. And then there was this:

Sam Herring emulating his infamous Letterman appearance – at least in part – live on stage in California last weekend. For the record, the latest single, Ran, is also available on the Coachella channel. There’s some good Radiohead too, but that’s not what this post is about.
UPDATE: This channel has since disappeared. Weird. 

As for the album, from a slow start, it’s become a very real contender for the coveted 6000 miles… Album of the Year award. I’m really intrigued to see what gets released from it too. I have my favourites (spoiler: they’re Ancient Waters and Cave), but let’s wait and see if the band/record label agrees.

Ugh… Cyclists

Ugh… Cyclists.

When they’re not jumping red lights, riding seventy-four abreast through Kalk Bay every weekend or whining about their morning jaunt being cancelled, they’re defecating in their hands and flinging it at fellow road-users.

Poo flinging? How very Capetonian.

But amazingly, the victim of the attack has come in for criticism after sharing the details of the incident online. Comments included:

“A man had time to pull down his trousers, poo in his hands and lob it at your car..?? Was you stationary..?? Because I’d of drove off the minute he was pulling down his trousers.!!”

Yeah – sorry about the grammar etc. It’s from Gloucester.

And my favourite:

“Anyone with half a brain cell would drive off as soon as the hand cupped to scoop the poop.”

Presumably these people are only aware of best practice here because this has happened to them too?
So there we go, folks. The two expert-recommended stages to commence driving away should you ever find yourself in a similar situation: the pulling down of the trousers and the cupping of the hand to scoop.

Leave it any later than that, and frankly, you’re asking for trouble.

Full story

Pack your trunk – we’re off to Mars

Vital space exploration news greeted me this morning in the shape of this headline from The Times:

Right. Obviously, besides the single benefit stated above, there are also drawbacks with sending elephants into space. For starters, their somewhat larger mass means that you’re going to need a lot more thrust to get you up to escape velocity and out of the Earth’s gravitational pull. They’re also pretty big in terms of volume, meaning that you’re going to need to increase the size of your spaceship to house them. They eat more, they drink more, they poo more, but perhaps our major concern here should be that we’re clearly ignoring the most important factor to consider in this whole plan: they are elephants.

Yes, elephants are ever so intelligent, but they are still elephants. We’ve all seen how clever and caring they can be on those nature documentaries, but elephants are let down by their inability to communicate in basic human language, let alone carrying out computer programming and complex scientific experimentation. In fact, aside from their alleged cancer-resisting traits (and perhaps their reputation for having really good memories), there’s not an awful lot that supports this frankly very dodgy idea to send elephants to colonise Mars.

And then, what if we were to actually follow through on this and colonise Mars with these pachyderms? It sets a worrying precedent for the future colonisation of other planets with somewhat implausible animals. So what next? Sending ornamental ducks to Jupiter? Hammerhead sharks to Saturn? An anteater to Venus? Presumably we’d have to send some ants as well for that last one. See how complicated it becomes?

No, this is a silly idea and we should stop right now. The elephants won’t mind – they’re very thick-skinned – and it might just save us from the inevitable onset of any immature Richard Gere “gerbils in Uranus” jokes.